Red Hat Devs Working on ARM64 OpenJDK Port

Andrew Haley, a Red Hat developer said in a blog post, “the current OpenJDK ARM situation is rather unsatisfactory.” Haley said that for the current 32-bit ARM processors, there are two version of VM for OpenJDK – HotSpot; one being a proprietary version by Oracle and another one free. The free version comes with a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that has quite a smaller footprint, which can’t compete with Oracle’s JIT.

Haley said, “We really don’t want this situation for A64, so we’re writing a port that will be entirely free software.” Red Hat will be writing the port and submitting it as OpenJDK project wherein others can join in. Because of lack of real hardware for ARMv8, the team has gone ahead with development of simple CPU simulator for their project. Testing on a simulator won’t give a 100 per cent confirmation that the port is bug free as once on real hardware, the team is expecting that some issues may come up.

Red Hat revealed that the template interpreter, which is the first step for any HotSpot port, is near completion and that the team expects it to be finished by Christmas following which the project will be made available publicly. Next the developers are targeting a client JIT compiler – C1 and once that is done they will move on the C2 – the server JIT compilers.

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